Taking a Peek into the Wonderful but Crazy World of George Condo

As someone who
loves album art, I have become fascinated with the contemporary visual artist
George Condo. For those who are familiar with Kanye West’s 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, you
might have heard about its controversial album cover of an armless winged
female creature straddling a man who looks like the musician. Although that
version of the album was banned, Condo created other artwork options. The one
that replaced it was a charming image of a ballerina in a black tutu holding a
glass of wine. Despite the controversy that caused, it remains one of the
greatest album covers of all time.

To get to know
the artist better, I watched his documentary for the Louisiana Channel. There
are several clips of him on their YouTube channel, but the one titled The
Way I Think best
summarizes what one needs to know about him. Similar to Pablo Picasso, he
showed a promising future in art at an early age. Some of his memorable pieces
in childhood were his macabre sketch of a crucifix and his series of
bright-colored dinosaurs. He tried to break away from his art background by
studying music theory in college but found it too stiff and austere. Instead,
he applied what he learned in his process: Condo works fast and follows the
rhythm of his pieces.

The artist
describes his work as ‘artificial realism’. “I try to depict a character’s
train of thoughts simultaneously – hysteria, joy, sadness, desperation. If you
could see these things at once, that would be like what I’m trying to make you
see in my art,” he said in an interview with The Guardian. Artificial realism could also mean
that the painter is creating something realistic while illustrating still all
that is artificial in this world. Since the interview was done in 2017, fake
news has become commonplace, making artificial realism more apparent in today’s
landscape. “Art is the truth, and everything else is a lie,” Condo
said.

In the same
Guardian interview, he also described his work as ‘psychological cubism’.
“Picasso painted a violin from four different perspectives at one moment.
I do the same with psychological states. Four of them can occur simultaneously.
Like glimpsing a bus with one passenger howling over a joke they’re hearing down
the phone, someone else asleep, someone else crying – I’ll put them all in one
face.”

The artist is
not shy about referencing those before him as well. “The only way for me
to feel the difference between every other artist and me is to use every artist
to become me,” he said. Condo’s knowledge of artists is impressive, and
the way he riffs them can be subtle unless one knows the artist he alludes to.
In another video from the same channel, one can watch him work on his piece
titled The Bus Driver’s Dream. At the
end of the video, he mentioned that his work turned out to be his take on
Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.

There is much
to know about George Condo, and these are just snippets of his process that we
can also apply to our own.

Photo
Attribution:

1st and featured image from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/The_Cloudmaker.jpeg